This is the first part of tutorial about Dear ImGui (AKA ImGui) and it’ll show you how to set it up with SFML. The second part will be library agnostic and will talk about common ways of doing stuff in ImGui, some awesome widgets and some useful STL overloads.

Different ImGui widgets (taken from ImGui’s github page)

Introduction

Having good content creation (level editor, resource editor, etc.) and debugging tools for your game is very important and can lead to productivity and creativity boost.

Here are some examples of tools I managed to make with ImGui for my game:

Level editor:

Animation editor:

(It was possible to add ability to change members of C++ objects with ImGui by doing some template magic, maybe I’ll write an article about that later!)

As you can see there’s a wide range of widgets that ImGui can provide and there are lots of other great examples of how other people use it here. Continue reading →

It’s time to summarize what I’ve done during this year with Re:creation. It has been very good year, I’ve managed to do and learn lots of stuff.

Before I write about the stuff I’ve done I want to thank everyone who followed my progress and provided feedback. This stuff is really important for me and always keeps me motivated. With your support I never feel doubt about my game, I never want to stop making it. Thank you.

Special thanks to SFML community. It turned my dev log thread into a very cool discussion and helped me out with lots of stuff. This level of support is much more than I’ve ever expected and it’s very heartwarming.

I’ll show the most interesting stuff I’ve done and then explain some in more detail.
Some screenshots are taken at different parts of the year, so they may differ a lot!

Some gameplay gifs to get you started:

This one is my favorite gif so far. It really shows a lot of stuff I’ve made this year.

There are many reasons to use Lua with C++. One of them is that you can put some of the logic from C++ code into scripts, so you can easily change them without the need or recompilation. You can also write some good interfaces, so the scripts are easy enough for even non-coders to write them. Lua is free, Lua is fast, Lua is used in game development quite often.

While there are plenty of good articles about using Lua with C++, I think there are not enough articles about how to use Lua in real projects.

This article is one of the many articles I plan to write. Here are some topics which my articles will cover:

Entity creation and other basic stuff (you’re reading this now)

How to implement entity creation

Managing Lua state and cleaning up

Scriptable state machines

Events and callbacks

The stuff described in the articles was mostly discovered during the development of my game called Re:creation.
I don’t think the methods here are perfect, but they’re good enough, fast and work well for me. So, your feedback is welcome. Feel free to leave comments and write e-mails to me about the stuff I can do better. I’m interested in hearing about your Lua/C++ usage!

While this is a C++ article, I think you can implement most of the things mentioned here in your favourite language. I’ll use Lua C API and LuaBridge for examples, so I recommend to read the following articles if you’re not familiar with them:

A long time has passed since I’ve written the last dev log! Is Re:creation dead? Is it stagnating? No, not at all. It’s more alive than ever now!
I haven’t written a new part of dev log because I had to study a lot in December and January. I had some time to develop some stuff during these month and had a lot of stuff done in February.
I’ve decided to write the dev log in two forms

First one will be about the features I’ve implemented recently and it will have a lot of pretty screenshots and gifs. (You’re reading this part right now).

Second one will be more specific and I’ll focus more on technical parts of the game and implementation details of some interesting features. This part is a lot harder to write so it’ll be less frequent than the first one.If you’re wondering about how I’ve implemented one or another feature of the game or its engine, feel free to write an email and ask about it! I’m always glad to answer.